Development

This week's code tour, done by foxfirefey, contains a bunch of code cleanup and backend fixes, plus the codemerge of two patches from LiveJournal: "filter journals/communities to posts by a specific user" and "show entries that are tagged with both of two tags". Thanks to LJ for the new features!

These changes won't be active on Dreamwidth itself until our next code push, which (in keeping with our recent schedule) will probably be next weekend. We'll announce it here and in dw_maintenance when we schedule it.

December Paid-Time Promotion

After last week's discussion and poll, we've decided that this year's December promotion will be the "10% points bonus" variety: all orders placed in the month of December will receive a 10% points bonus. This is our way of saying "thank you" to all y'all for supporting us and helping to keep us "on the air", so to speak!

Right now it looks like we'll be closing out the year with a shortfall. This isn't as critical as it seems -- we built our five-year plan expecting to take a while until we got to true profitability, and we're still well within the margins that plan called for. But still: If you have the cash to spare, please consider supporting us. We are 100% user-financed: we accept zero advertising and sponsorship, so your payments are the only thing that keep us running. Our goals for 2011 include increasing our server capacity, sending more of our volunteer developers to conferences and training, and hiring some of our developers to work on DW full-time for short contract periods to work on specific projects. All of that takes money!

Construction Warning

As part of our long-term goal to clean up the site's display and make it easier to maintain and extend in the future, we're starting a project this week to clean up all of the site's HTML and CSS structure. This includes standardizing CSS classes, removing tables that are used entirely for layout, and changing around bits of the site layout to be consistent across all pages.

Obviously we'll be testing the heck out of stuff before we commit the changes and push them live on the site, but there's always a chance we'll miss something! We'll be sure to warn you at the time of the code push that contains the changes, but this is a heads-up that there might be some weirdnesses over the next month or two. We'll let you know where to report them once we really get going.

Code Pushed

Sunday's code push went swimmingly (zero reported issues -- I think that's the first time that's ever happened; it made us really nervous!) and the things contained in the following two code tours are now live on the site:

* You can swap the contents of two usernames easily, with only two rename tokens, instead of having to do a complicated and messy dodge with three tokens and a shell-game switch around of usernames.

* It is no longer possible to log into memorial accounts or post or delete entries from them. This will protect those accounts in case anyone tries to break into them to vandalize them.

* Bugfix: a problem with the way email addresses were displayed on the profile was fixed, so your profile should no longer display "(error in linkification)".

* Bugfix: the comment displayed when you're replying to a comment in the site layout has been fixed so it no longer always displays the commenter's default icon, even when a different icon has been chosen for the comment.

* Thanks to heroic work by ninetydegrees, all of our site themes and layouts now use the same, standardized font customization options.

* Bugfix: due to a bug in our changes to allow icon keyword renames to be re-enabled, you couldn't select your default icon when editing an entry. This is now fixed.

New Themes

With the code push, there are a bunch of new themes available for your journal:

As always, if you have a theme or layout you'd like to submit for a system style, or if you want to help with converting submitted themes into system styles, check out dreamscapes.

Community Awesomeness

* This week's Etsy treasury contains the usual roundup of awesomeness from DW users who are crafters. I never fail to be impressed by how talented our users are. (As always, if you've got an Etsy shop, or a shop elsewhere on the 'net, leave me a comment so I can include you in a future treasury.)

That's it for us for another week! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

We'll see you next week for our next update, which I've asked fu to do since it will be US Thanksgiving and sarah and I will be traveling. (And we will also be homeowners. Where's my paper bag?) If you're in the US, or celebrate US Thanksgiving, I hope it's a good one for you!

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the comment displayed when you're replying to a comment in the site layout has been fixed so it no longer always displays the commenter's default icon, even when a different icon has been chosen for the comment.I cannot parse this sentence - can anyone explain it?

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So, if you open up the "reply to comment" in a new window/tab, it displays the comment you're replying to (for context). We broke something so that the comment that displays would always show the default icon, rather than the icon that was chosen for the comment. It is fixed now!

(Better? Three days from house closing = frazzled and not-communicating-well D.)

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That's actually really interesting, and a good argument for keeping the practice of code tours. (Originally it was just me doing a "this week in development" every few months or so, to show off to people what we were doing, but the response was so good we made it a regular thing!)

But yeah, that kind of reaction is just proof of my main theory of customer interaction, namely, that when customers know what's going on they are willing to be patient with just about anything (within reason of course). It's one of the major reasons why we go for as much transparency as possible.

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we're starting a project this week to clean up all of the site's HTML and CSS structure.

You might want to make sure you fix the problem with some of the layouts then. They do not allow the main body to be wider than say, 300px or something.

I assumed it was only an incompatibility with Firefox at first, but since I've seen something similar over at lj too, where there was even a horrendous formatting breakdown--words and sentences of entries were randomly 12pt/7pt/30pt/etc.--and another user I talked to said she saw no problem--using Windows and Internet Explorer, I have a suspicion it could be that dreamwidth simply has a problem with Linux.

Would you look into that, or shall I post this over at support? Need a screenshot to demonstrate?

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Hm, yeah, could you open a support request? With screenshot if possible (support requests can't use HTML, but if you just put in the URL of the image it'll be good enough). It'd be most helpful if you include a) which layouts you're having problems with and b) what broswer/resolution/OS you're using. Thanks!

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Hee. We actually have a plethora of cardboard boxes (scrounged from science supply stores mostly -- sarah is a forensic DNA analyst, and a friend also works in a nearby lab) and Sarah's sister moved lately, so we've got her boxes too. It's just, auuuugh, so much to PACK!

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We've been considering ways to do that! A few pushes ago we introduced a way to easily change the categories that themes are displayed in, so it's likely that in the future, we'll have a "new since last push" type category. I let fu handle that though, I'm idiotic about styles. *G*

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Is it allowed to post the question "tell me why you should be gifted a paid account", and where would I do it? I'd like to gift someone 6 months paid time, but I'd like it to be someone who will post regularly and make Dreamwidth more awesome, not just squat on an LJ username. For instance, can I do that in dw_codesharing?

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Bugfix: the comment displayed when you're replying to a comment in the site layout has been fixed so it no longer always displays the commenter's default icon, even when a different icon has been chosen for the comment.

I AM SO GLAD \o/ (no, seriously, that had me weirded out, but I figured it'd get fixed, and lo! I was right. *g*)

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um, might i suggest not using 'American' here to refer to a US holiday? maybe i'm being overly picky, as i assume most people understand the term american to be shorthand for US-american. but there are non-US and non-canadian countries that are also american by virtue of being on the american continent.

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+39 for the awesomeness of ongoing answering of the question, "How long does it take a motivated community to create and improve a journaling site?"

Also, paper bags are good for closing. You might want to bring a dozen color coded envelopes. Absolutely everyone at the table has a check and a piece of paper that gets passed one direction and then signed and countersigned. (Envelopes was a tad hyperbolic: one of the few things the title people actually do, is track 'em.)

A shoutout for Ms. D.

For one, a home of your own. That's *awesome.
My partner and I wish you both success beyond your wildest
dreams in all ways and all things.
For two, keeping us posted. Thank you.
We are tech savvy people and apprectiate the transparency
in the way you keep us informed.
Have a fab-BOO-lous holiday week, next week.
Both of us estranged from our respective families, we had a
"Friendsgiving" with our best friends and it was *wonderful.*
/\__/\
(='.'=)
(")_(")

Wow, mazel tov on the getting of house!

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I know someone who may want to rename their main journal (we'll call it A) with the name of another journal that she imported (journal B), but she doesn't care about keeping the main journal name (A) afterwards. However, she doesn't want to lose the contents of A or B. Is this possible and does she need two rename tokens or just one?

And how much are the tokens, please? I couldn't find it in the FAQ or the shop (my searching skills fail me.)

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1) If she truly doesn't care what name journal A winds up with, she will only need one token. The contents of B will wind up at the username of A; the contents of A will be automatically renamed away to a system-designated username (something like "ex_usernameA_123", with the last 3 numbers randomly generated). If she wants former-A to have an intelligible name, it will take the two tokens, yeah, and the two usernames will swap. (Or, she can use the two tokens separately: rename B to A, then rename ex_usernameA_123 to anything she wants.) The faq has more details, although it doesnt' detail two-token swaps yet (i haven't updated it).

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Ok so I got busy and didn't read the code tour for a couple of weeks, but now I'm catching up on them. I also really like DW code tours, but loath the format LJ uses. For one, you make the post quite short before you use a cut tag.